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Imperial Sticks
Cut stale bread in one-third inch slices, remove the crusts. Spread thinly with butter. Cut slices in one-third inch strips, put on a tin sheet and bake until a delicate brown in a hot oven. Pile "log cabin" fashion on a plate covered with a doily, or serve two sticks on plate by the side of cup in which soup is served.
A soup accompaniment rather than a bread recipe: buttered toast batons, crisped through so they hold up beside a cup of soup. The only thing to get right is the cut and the drying.
- Hot ovenIn books of this era "hot" generally means somewhere in the 400-450F range. At that heat thin strips colour quickly, so watch them and take them out at the "delicate brown" the recipe asks for; the buttered edges brown first.
- One-third inchAn awkward figure by modern eyes, but deliberate: slices this thin dry all the way through instead of leaving a soft core. Slicing and then cutting into strips of the same width gives you square batons about 8 mm on a side.
- Stale bread mattersDay-old firm white bread cuts cleanly and dries rather than steams. Fresh bread tears under the knife and stays leathery in the middle. A close-crumbed sandwich loaf works better than an open artisan crumb.
- Butter thinly"Spread thinly" is the instruction to obey. A heavy coat of butter fries the surface and the sticks go greasy and limp within the hour; a scrape is enough for flavour and colour.
- Tin sheetA plain tin baking sheet. The recipe says nothing about greasing it. Spread the strips out with space between them so hot air reaches all four sides.
- Holding and servingThey are best eaten soon after baking, though they will keep for a while in a tin and can be crisped again in a low oven. The doily is decorative only.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era when a formal dinner opened with soup and the soup needed something dry and crisp beside it rather than a bread roll. Names like "imperial sticks" were probably unremarkable in turn-of-the-century American menu writing, where a grand adjective attached to a plain thing seems to have signalled that the dish was fit for company; the sticks themselves are simply oven-dried buttered toast, kin to the croutons, bread fingers and "soup sticks" that fill the same slot in other books of the period. The recipe also reflects a household habit that has largely disappeared: stale bread was a daily resource, not a waste product, and cookbooks of the 1900s routinely turned it into crumbs, puddings, panadas and garnishes. Serving soup in a cup rather than a plate, with two sticks laid alongside, is often said to have been a fashion of the same decades, and may point to a lighter, more informal course than the tureen and soup plate of a generation earlier.